Reviewed by Tania Roy
National University of Singapore

Thought Images: Frankfurt School Writers' Reflections from Damaged
Life rescues the minor philosophical genre of the Denkbilder,
the "thought-image"--"a poetic form of condensed, epigrammatic
writing in textual snapshots" (2)--and deploys it to re-read seminal
philosophical and literary texts by members of the Frankfurt School.
In his chapter on Walter Benjamin, Gerhard Richter refers to critical
review-essays of One-Way Street by Ernst Bloch, Siegfried Kracauer
and Theodor Adorno, commenting obliquely on the philosophical uses of
the critical review-essay. Reviewed by Bloch and Kracauer in 1928, the
same year of its publication, One-Way Street sought to rescue
the ephemera of everyday metropolitan life by capturing its passage
epigrammatically, in a series of condensed philosophical images. In
their own abbreviated citations of Benjamin's text, as recounted by
Richter, these commentaries re-enact the loosely methodological stance
of One Way Street. Richter thereby identifies a "textual
meeting-ground" for a circle of friends, as well as a constellation
of core philosophical, aesthetic and political concerns historically
identified with the Frankfurt School (including a shared preoccupation
with the material registers of metropolitan existence, their deployment
in the form of historical montage for the uses of radical historiography,
philosophic reflections on the transaction between the material world
and aesthetic form as sited in modern music, the experience of personal
homelessness and cultural exile, and the historical catastrophe of Auschwitz).
Through the form of the philosophical review, Bloch, Kracauer and Adorno
each stage their friend's abiding concern with the question of distance
(Abstand), the notion of a "stance in perpetual negotiation
with its own proper proximity or distance to that which it relates"
(53). This matter of positionality--of one's own intimacy with or remove
from the text, the approximation of which remains unresolved in the
absence of absolute extra-textual measures--might describe Gerhard Richter's
own writerly relation to the historical and philosophical legacy of
the Frankfurt School.

Equally productive for a critical reconsideration of the literary and
intellectual history of the Frankfurt School is the degree of biographical
latitude that such a move allows. Shifting arrangements of Denkbilder
are read across the texts and authors represented in the study, thereby
recasting the intellectual history of the Frankfurt School in light
of complex personal affinities and extra-institutional exigencies. Richter
handles the Denkbild as a material form through which these compounded
histories become legible in the very indissolubility of their relations.
By taking such an approach, Gerhard Richter's uses of the Denkbild
might itself be construed in accordance with Benjamin's practice of
"rettende Kritik" (rescuing criticism/critique), which
turned on the rescue of superceded forms and histories for the purposes
of contemporary cultural criticism. Exceeding its function as the organizing
principle of a comparative study of Benjamin, Bloch, Kracauer and Adorno,
the thought-image allows Richter to effectively re-nominate the
Frankfurt School as well as the tradition of Critical Theory associated
with it. I shall discuss the scope and efficacy of this strategy, before
turning to Richter's literary history of the Denkbild and its
deployment within his own analysis.

I.
The designation "the Frankfurt School," and its association
with works like Adorno's Minima Moralia or Benjamin's belatedly
representative One-WayStreet and The Arcades Project,
serves to authorize Richter's inclusion of institutionally peripheral
figures like Bloch and Kracauer within its historical ambit. Richter
develops recent directions in the intellectual biography of the Frankfurt
School, which destabilize the presumption of a unified "school"
by locating its philosophical integrity beyond its official origins
in the Institute for Social Research. Bloch and Kracauer are presented
as vital interlocutors of core members of the Frankfurt School, so that
the dialogue between its official representatives and these two early
mentors is demonstrated, as an aspect of life-long friendship,
to be mutually formative. Placing critical value on the extended personal
histories maintained between these figures, Richter follows and develops
the work of the pre-eminent Frankfurt School historian Rolf Wiggerhaus.
For Wiggerhaus, these writers are intellectually related not only through
their shared uses of critical materialism, a methodological commitment
that characterized the Institute's official program; but also, especially,
in their writerly deployment of short forms like the essay, the
aphorism or fragment, encyclopedic citation, and the montage. Fidelity
to the micro-phenomenological method--a recitation of the obsolete or
neglected elements of quotidian life, which are placed into a new "cultural
syntax" and thereby transvalued into an image of historical redemption--situates
the closely aligned figures of Benjamin and Adorno in proximity with
Bloch and Kracauer, within the same constellation of aesthetic, political
and philosophical concerns. This cluster of micro-messianic thinkers
is formalized into a "school" not in a homogenous relationship
to institutional origins, but through a shared commitment to the form
of the Denkbild. (Indeed, with the Denkbild as its criterion,
Richter's nomination of the "Frankfurt School" is advanced
by excluding Max Horkheimer, director of the Institute and Adorno's
collaborator in the most cited text of the Frankfurt School, Dialectic
of Enlightenment). Such a deliberate slackening of the "school"
from recognizable institutional ties is conceptually pertinent for Richter's
argument. Beyond the stakes of a revisionist historical claim, Richter's
analysis delineates a tradition of literary presentation that
might belong properly to the Frankfurt School--a mode of writing that
exposes this same identification as interminably, and uncontainably,
at odds with its own official origins.

More ambitiously, then, Richter's historiography of the "Frankfurt
School" re-functionalizes the term conceptually. Richter
mobilizes the idea of a "school" in order to advance
a speculative history of displacement, suggesting a non-identical subject
that is always elsewhere in relation to its origins. Put otherwise,
the force of Richter's reference destabilizes any attempt to territorialize
the traditions of the Frankfurt School. "Frankfurt," "Germany,"
the continuing institutionalization of its textual authority: these
coordinates are displaced by an account of transnational exchanges,
which unfold across an urban (rather than national) axis involving Berlin,
Paris, Los Angeles and New York. Moreover, whether a city of childhood
(Benjamin's Berlin), of self-translation or exile (Paris, Los Angeles,
New York), each city is conceived not as a system of closed urban signs
and references; rather, much like the image of a city's map in Benjamin's
One-Way Street (discussed at length in the first chapter), they
constitute a series of "metropolitan figures" linked together
"into a specific concept of experience" (46, emphasis
mine). And Richter locates not only a geographically but also a temporally
heterogeneous subject of experience in this textual relay of Denkbilder,
written for and as responses to absent or missing friends, across metropolitan
coordinates that plot the effective denationalization of a presumed
first language and its forms. Each urban and textual coordinate in this
history of community and dispersal functions as a placeholder for constitutive
loss--for losses that are formative of life in the present, the
"damaged life" of and after the rise of the Third Reich, which
Richter cites from the subtitle of Adorno's Minima Moralia as
the heading of his own study.

This loss cannot simply be described and then categorized according
to generic taxonomies but calls attention to itself as loss
. Collectively, my readings of Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch and Kracauer--all
careful readers of Freud--show that the philosophical miniatures of
the Denkbilder can be best understood as unfolding on the far
side of [Freud's normalizing] binary opposition between mourning and
melancholia. The Denkbild enacts a series of engagements with
the constitutive loss that make a subject what it is:
the loss of democracy under fascism; the loss of the certainties of
the Hegelian "system"; the loss of home in displacement
and exile; the loss of stable meaning and readability in modernity;
and the loss of the other, such as an absent or dying friend. (34-5,
emphasis mine).

If the reference to the Frankfurt School crosses from its origins in
the Weimar generation (Bloch, Benjamin, Kracauer) into the experience
of the German-Jewish émigré in Los Angeles or New York
after the 1940s--the reader recalls that this crossing is punctuated
by Benjamin's absence--it allows Richter to resist conventional periodization.
Thought-images narrates, instead, an intergenerational history
of friendship. It is here that Richter recasts established receptions
of the Frankfurt School, opening for his own readers the question of
a proper Abstand to history and their own cultural location.
Richter re-designates the "Frankfurt School" as a history
of extra-territorial solidarities maintained in the face of communal
dispersal, and the Denkbild, as a formal strategy directed against
the coercive coordination of linguistic identity by a hyper-nationalist
state. From here, Richter illuminates an intellectual passage between
German-Jewish writers of the first half of the twentieth century and
Jacques Derrida's recent reflections on post-colonial "monolingualism"
in order to exploit this concept's implicit reconfiguration of liberal
multiculturalist discourses, and to engage, above all, the politics
of friendship. Derrida's so-called "political" writings from
the 1990s to the turn of the millennium establish the parameters of
a method for Richter, an approach that is maintained through each of
his readings. Casting the form of the Denkbild as an inherently
dedicatory mode of address, Richter tilts his own study toward
Derrida's axiomatic assertion of the law of friendship in terms of finitude
and mourning, thereby multiplying the rhetorical force of each "commemorative"
work by running the latter's signature across it.

The friends, whose complex personal relations to each other were
modulated by the genre of the Denkbilder, shared this experience
of finitude . The Denkbilder that they wrote with, through,
and for each other thus can also be read as miniature memorials, small
gravestones that commemorate, even before the other's passing, the
mourning to which all friendship is exposed. (191)

The short form of the Denkbild afforded Bloch, Benjamin, Adorno
and Kracauer a genre for a quasi-epistolary circulation of ideas. Further,
each Denkbild works through a situative heteronomy--in writing
for another, the subject fails, in the very movement of its dedicatory
gesture, to be fully present to itself.

Friendship will always have been conditioned by the future absence
of the other, even of the self in the other, and by the fact that
one or the other will be inevitably left behind--as in 1940, when
Adorno received news of Benjamin's suicide during the latter's escape
from the Nazis; as in 1966, when Adorno, Bloch and Horkheimer, all
in Germany, learnt of Kracauer's unexpected death in New York from
a lung infection; as in 1969, when Horkheimer spoke at the graveside
of Adorno; and as in 1973, when news of Horkheimer's death reached
Bloch. (192)

At once the writing of fatality, the "graveside" knowledge
of a present in which one has been perpetually left behind, Denkbilder
are also promissory. Like Richter's idea of the "Frankfurt School,"
they are the sign of an irreplaceable bond that opens up the ability
to read, as it were, ahead of one's self. This rule, by which
a historical future is anticipated in the register of finitude ("future
absence"), is exemplified through Richter's own strategic interpellation
of the utopic dimensions of Frankfurt School thought into the Derridean
address to friendship.

The approach is effective in rescuing and renewing the uses of Minima
Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life, Adorno's classic text
on cultural and personal displacement written in his Californian exile,
between 1944 and 1947. Richter's treatment of the text is consistent
with Adorno's own micro-phenomenological reflections, the 153 aphorisms
that mobilize the specificity of subjective experience to interrupt
dominant ideological economies of, on the one hand, hyper-nationalism,
and, on the other, the "culture industry." Richter's own prismatic
reading takes a unique approach, however, passing the text through the
lens of its brief opening dedication, the address to the first name
of a friend, "Max." Through prosopopoeia, the Derridean appeal
to the missing friend, Richter's Adorno "mourns the writerly absence
of his friend from his work by making the voice of the friend part
of a ghostly dialogue and the structuring principle of the entire
work" (164, emphasis mine).

Here, Richter disengages from generalizations about this representative
text of Adorno that identify it as categorically "aesthetic,"
that is to say, as enacting an unspecified process or type of literary
modernism that rehearses its autonomy or separation from everyday life.
Richter cites Hans Robert Jauss's genealogy of modernism from Rousseau
to Adorno; but this is a recognizable reading that has been advanced
frequently in order to plot Adorno's putative flight from the trauma
of politics, signified here by "Hitler" and elsewhere, in
Dialectic of Enlightenment as "instrumental reason."
Typically concluding with Adorno's belated and introverted turn to "modernist"
aesthetics, this reading has been reiterated variously over the past
two decades, by social and aesthetic theorists such as Axel Honneth
and Albrecht Wellmer. Neil Larson's widely cited Modernism and Hegemony:
A Material Critique of Aesthetic Agencies is a recent development
within this paradigm, in which Adorno's allegedly self-referential poetics
are symptomatic of a Nietzschean "totalizing critique of reason"/representation,
which is radicalized in the collaboration with Horkheimer. Richter's
reading of Minima Moralia as turning on a textual gesture
of interruption--a suspension, literally and conceptually, of his
collaborative work with Horkheimer--should be underscored in light of
this dominant paradigm.

Richter does indeed rescue and amplify the Nietzschean resonances of
Adorno's "melancholic science," insisting that each Denkbild
deploys something like a poetic persona in narrating everyday life in
"administered" societies. Distancing the historical Horkheimer
and the programmatic work of the Institute from the spectralized return
of "Max" the friend, Richter points to an actual conversation
that has been interrupted by the baleful imposition of "singular,
monolithic meaning" (the ideology of fascism, life in exile); and
by personal contingencies (Horkheimer's illness) (165). As a remark
upon Derrida's politics of friendship, Richter's reading presents these
Denkbilder as "transcripts of an interior dialogue rather
than a monologue or an actual dialogue" (164). A figure of muteness
to which writing addresses itself, "Max" is, in other words,
an exemplary instance of the Denkbild. Naming a spectralized
presence within the text, it registers the inherent plurality of the
authorial voice. The force of such an address, which is directed toward
missingpossibilities is, indeed, understood within a
"politics," and is the structuring principle of Richter's
study. It is presented as a strategy for interrupting the multiple genealogical
continuities--different ideological traditions that provide the antecedents
of Fascism, as well as different national histories that produce
the politics of hyper-identity--signified by "Hitler." (Such
a reading resonates, against Larsen, with Miriam Hansen's far-reaching
thesis on a "vernacular modernism," which considers the possibilities
of a classical modernist repertoire when it is displaced into a "dialect"
of localized, sensually mediated registers.) If "Hitler" signifies
the coercive coordination of identity, cultural meaning and origins,
MinimaMoralia's naming of absence denaturalizes
this language of origins--what Habermas has termed a "community
of descent," the assumption of an innocent bond to language, and
thereby, to kin.

This argument has been authoritatively stated by Martin Jay in The
Dialectical Imagination (1973). Jay's thesis on "permanent
exile" introduced the tradition of Western Marxism to an Anglo-American
readership, identifying it with the Frankfurt School's philosophical
intransigency to fixed cultural origins and their geopolitical coordinates.
Richter's discussion of the uses of photographic self-representation
in the chapter entitled "Homeless Images: Kracauer's Extra-territoriality,
Derrida's Monolingualism" borrows Jay's thesis in order to repurpose
it for a commentary on specifically postcolonial negotiations
of national memory.

Richter positions both thinkers, the German-Jewish Kracauer and the
Algerian-Jewish Francophone Derrida, through Adorno's 1965 essay "On
the Question, 'What Is German?'" This personalized essay rehearses
the painful disenchantment of an intimate "first language"
by placing it in the mouth of the returning émigré, the
one to whom its uses are no longer natural. The essay--and Adorno's
mobilization of the essay as a form, as Eva Geulen has argued,
highlighting its oral delivery in a nationalized radio address--paratactically
connects Kracauer with Derrida. Marking a critical turn in the argument,
Kracauer's philosophic preoccupation with homelessness (Obdachlosigkeit)
is placed within Derrida's contemporary reflections on the European
Union (including his reflections on autobiography, in the shadow-memoir
Monolingualism of the Other: or, Prosthesis of Origin). In this
cluster of ethico-political texts, "Europe" is approached
both as a geopolitical entity, and as a notion. Arguably, it is Derrida's
inflection of the question of a post-national politics beyond the "exhausted
programs of Eurocentricism and anti-Eurocentricism" that directs
the discussion here (128). Through Derrida (and in implicit tension
with models derived from Homi Bhabha), Richter emphasizes the colonial's
experience of a curiously pauperized first language through which
each claim to cultural identity exposes a hybridity at odds with itself;
a self that is "clustered around not a core of stable meaning,
but a network of differences," neither European nor non-European,
both Jewish and non-Jewish (124).

Crucial to this thesis is the startling portrait of Kracauer, printed
from its original cracked glass plate and reproduced on the cover of
the book. Historically, Richter identifies the photograph with Kracauer's
literary Denkbild, "Farewell to Lindenarcade," both
dating from 1930. "Farewell to Lindenarcade" textually traverses
an uncanny physical space, the arcade, in which established histories
coincide and distort each others' teleological significance. Here, physical
objects (or rather, our encounter with them) are de-territorialized,
that is to say, wrenched away from recognizable historical referents.
Richter deploys the Denkbild in just such a manner, as a point
from which to reconfigure Kracauer's major works on film and philosophy
of history (from the Weimar period Denkbilder of The MassOrnament, the 1960 Theory of Film, begun in transit in
1941 in Marseilles, and the major, posthumous History: Last Things
before the Last). Richter effectively undoes conventional periodizations
of Kracauer's works in terms of the usual progression from his "Weimer
generation" writings to the later works. Simultaneously, the discussion
of photography, cinema and its possibilities for alternative historiographic
practices is displaced from its origins in the "exilic imagination"--a
tradition of Continental thought that emerges from the German-Jewish
identification of "Europe"--to the postcolonial.

In what is perhaps the most dramatic reading of the book, Richter illuminates
the image of Kracauer, immobilized in the fractures of the photograph,
in terms of the subject's "struggle" to appropriate dominant
(colonial or nationalist) means of representation. In an exceptionally
close reading, Richter demonstrates that in failing to coincide with
itself, the photographed sitter escapes from normative teleologies of
belonging and citizenship that are consolidated in the racialization
of linguistic identity. (Kracauer's non-Europeanized, bizarrely "Asiatic"
features already suggested such congenital "failure" to his
friends.) Here, the photographic portrait of Kracauer should be considered
not only in terms of Richter's remarkable interpretation of it as a
de-racialized yet thoroughly embodied "image of homelessness."
The force of the reading resides, in my view, in its treatment of the
photographic portrait as a genre, which has served historically
to expose and thereby document

the multiple displacements of the self that are inextricably intertwined
with the ways in which that self struggles to make sense of itself
in relation to what it is not: the other culture, the other cultural
identities, the other modes of belonging It is here, in each
encounter with a never-before-seen-image that we must allow the visual
text to reinvent us the photograph itself can be read
as a homeless image of extraterritoriality. (135, emphasis mine)

II.
As a formal negotiation of the cultural frames that both burden and
produce identity, the visual Denkbild is iterable as well as
translatable across different histories of self-representation. Such
attention to the generic uses and possibilities of Denkbilder
is subtended by a condensed literary history of the thought-image, which,
as I read it, is organized around a paradox. Identified as an inherently
exilic form, the thought-image is excavated, nonetheless, as an irreducible
element of German literary and aesthetic traditions.

Originating as a marginal speculative and aesthetic form in Hegel's
"system," the Denkbilder are described as "philosophical
miniatures ... that hover between philosophical critique and aesthetic
production . [u]sually without a developed plot or a prescribed
narrative agenda, yet charged with philosophical insight" (2).
Richter's intellectual genealogy of the Denkbilder conjoins early
German Romanticism with its exploitation and reinvention in the early
twentieth century. In a compressed commentary on the literary precedents
of the modernist Denkbilder, Richter essays a tradition that
originates on the periphery of Hegel's speculative philosophy in the
artwork's insistence on finitude and singularity. For Friedrich Schlegel,
Schelling and Höelderlin, the affirmation of appearance (Schein)
remarked the procedures by which a truth-claim was materialized
in a given work. Mediating the breach effected by Kant's distinction
between theoretical and practical philosophy, Schein specified
the claims of conceptual reasoning in an experience that was both unique
and sensuously grounded. Artistic form deployed the singularity of experience
with, rather than against, conceptual labor.

This accent in the legacy of so-called German Idealism was retained
by German and Austrian writers of the early twentieth century and the
Weimar Republic, such as Karl Krauss, Robert Musil, Stefan George and
Bertolt Brecht. By modernizing various short forms like the maxim, the
aphorism, the pictorial hieroglyph, this generation claimed a "buried
poetic tradition" whose authority derived precisely from its marginal
position within "great" or systematic philosophic writing.
Writers of the emerging Frankfurt School privileged these minor forms
to inscribe, in part, their own affinity with contemporaries and close
forerunners while also re-functionalizing a "tradition" for
their own ideological purposes. From Simmel's micro-phenomenology of
everyday objects in commodity cultures, Benjamin's recuperation of the
maudlin, that is to say particularly German tradition of the
mourning play and its uses of the Baroque emblem, to the migration of
Nietzsche's aphoristic prose style into metropolitan tropes derived
from Baudelaire's "Paris," the micrological gesture valorizes
negligible cultural practices, as well as moods considered insignificant
to legitimate social and political affects, rendering these into the
signs of an alternative cultural semiotics. For the Frankfurt School,
the urbane Denkbild re-nominates a German literary tradition
that is both originary and self-displacing. As a generalizable form,
the Denkbild marks the paradoxical "position of naming belonging
without itself belonging" (19)--in other words, it is a category
of writerly resistance deployed against the forced coordination of cultural
identity.

Richter's contribution to the understanding of a genre is most innovative
in its discussion of Ernst Bloch, and his lifelong adherence to the
uses of the sound-figure. In the chapter, "Bloch's Dream, Music's
Traces," Richter's formal attention to the musicality of Bloch's
writing complicates the presumptive stability and conceptual accessibility
of his extensive oeuvre, which is typically characterized as "overtly"
or transparently political. Richter interposes Bloch's rhetorically
saturated, figurative style into the trajectory of his substantive concerns
(the uses of history, the political future of Marxian utopianism, religion);
the early Spirit of Utopia (1918; 1923), the Denkbilder of
Traces (1930), the Heritage of Our Times (1933), the late
Experimentum Mundi (1975), these texts do manifest an apparent
conceptual availability. Richter's treatments of these texts, however,
highlight their acutely stylized prose. Exploiting the inherent instability
of figurative writing, Bloch suggests that the historically specified
content of his work ("religion," "politics") might
be perpetually conditioned, and so revised, by the tropes through
which it is articulated. Bloch's attention to the formal specificity
of his own language poses an embarrassing contradiction to the reader
for whom the ideological meaning of his oeuvre may be arrested
in a series of "detachable truth claims" (73).

For Richter, Bloch writes above all, and across his far-reaching socio-political
concerns, from the linguistic limit case of the musical composition.
As a materially conditioned effect of social and historical inscriptions,
the musical composition and its performance is a text; yet it stands
in a necessarily non-referential relationship to the material
world. By existing only in the execution of its singular form--in its
iterability, the composition is citable but may never be paraphrased--the
musical performance differentiates itself from its pre-presentational
significance. While unable to participate in the discursivity of language,
this peculiar species of textuality manifests, non-mimetically and iterably,
"the ways in which all acts of signification point to other acts
of signification that exceed their adherence to any particular set of
referents" (74). All textual signification is, in part,
non-denotative and allegorical, a "question of figures and
figuration" (74). Developed by Bloch's Denkbilder
in Traces into a leitmotif, the allegorical sound-figure enacts,
even further, the compositional principle of Bloch's own writerly
practice (outlining a method that was shared, most closely, by Adorno).

Richter removes the matter of Bloch's style from its origins in German
Expressionism, aligning it with the contemporary reflections of Jean-Luc
Nancy in Sense of the World. For both Bloch and Nancy, music
is paradigmatic of all acts of cultural signification, understood as
"the perpetual manufacturing, performance and displacement of sense
[whereby] presentation is its meaning, and its meaning
is its performance" (80). Richter positions this emphasis
on the performativity of cultural meaning polemically, against Kant's
devalorization of music in the Critique of Judgment; and the
privilege awarded there to painting. In valorizing painting for its
apparent stability and presence, Kant elevated the visual faculty over
others, confirming the epistemological as well as disciplinary powers
of the eye: as for other eighteenth-century European thinkers, the Kantian
eye would ratify otherwise abstract discourses on universality and freedom.
Put differently, Kant's ocularcentrism reifies a cultural privilege
awarded to aesthetic forms that underwrite the values of stability and
presence. Cast, then, in a dramatically interventionist role, and against
his self-understanding, Bloch

rectifies a latent ocularcentrism that unites Kant with so many other
thinkers of the eighteenth century [who] evoke an ideological
tradition that regards vision as "the noblest of senses"
from Plato to Descartes via the Enlightenment and its fear of darkness
all the way to Merleau-Ponty, Sartre and the postmodernists .
Bloch dethrones vision as the sense that--owing to its capacity to
transform the world into a modern Weltbild, or world image,
as Heidegger later terms it --is capable of standing metonymically
for all the other senses, able to subsume the variegated perceptions
that they offer under the hegemony of the eye. (87-8)

Bloch's synaesthetic inversion of visual and auditory registers presents
a "supplement" to (interruption within) Kant's legacy. Of
course, Richter's own uses of Bloch re-stage a struggle over the meaning
and status of musical traditions that is profoundly internal
to the "heritage" of German critical theory. Suggesting that
this heritage remains non-coincidental, Richter's study enacts the manner
in which its promise might be "potentially legible elsewhere"
(91); in suppressed traditions of cultural performance that resist the
colonization of perception through hierarchical visual regimes.

Richter's nomination of "Frankfurt School" writers turns
on an ideologically vested account of friendship and exile that implicitly
bears, vis-à-vis a politics of dispersal and belonging,
on contemporary, postcolonial considerations. As a mode of resistance
against the instrumentalization of place names and identity for nationalistic
purposes, Denkbilder enact not only the "concrete and conceptual
struggle against the reactionary modes of cultural and political coordination
that constituted the so-called conservative revolution in Germany in
the 1920's and 30's" (8). Thought-images transports the
signature of the "Frankfurt School" past its own origins toward
cultural uses and contexts that are strikingly unpredictable, perpetuating
its legacy in a gesture of consummate fidelity.